Concrete Safaris empowers children to be healthy leaders through outdoor exercise and education programs that enrich the mind, body, community & environment. According the NYC Department of Health, East Harlem has some of the highest rates of childhood obesity and diabetes in New York City. Since 2008, 7-11-year-old children enrolled in Concrete Safaris' year-round programs and living in East Harlem have learned how the physical environment where they live, learn, and play impacts their health. Concrete Safaris' participants make major programmatic decisions, adding gardening, running, cycling, fishing, hiking, and swimming to our curriculum while addressing disease prevention from the child's perspective. The organization advances all 10 objectives of the California Children's Outdoor Bill of Rights, which lists 10 activities "all children 'should have a chance to experience between the ages of 4 and 14" and beyond," including "Play in the water, Play in a safe place, Hike, bike or ride on a trail, and Explore nature outdoors." Concrete Safaris is a replicable model for social change and the only non-profit agency in New York City specifically providing health-based programming and materials for children who live in and around the public housing projects to create and maintain edible, vibrant gardens on NYC Housing Authority property, and for those children to exercise outdoors 5+ days/week. NYC Commissioner of Health Thomas Farley and Deborah A. Cohen wrote in Prescription for a Healthy Nation: "It's time for us to understand how the features of our everyday world affect us, and then to alter them in an explicit, deliberate way so that we can be healthier." We could not agree more!

Based at the East Harlem Neighborhood Health Action Center (Lexington Avenue and 115th Street), Concrete Safaris offers year-round after school and summer workshops in which children (ages 7-11) learn to be proactive community leaders via outdoor physical fitness, environmental health education, and experiential education projects. The organization also offers project-based programming for high school students.